Fill in the Blanks

+ Answer 1

Yes, you expect the males and females to cooperate because they do have some things in common, but the reality is that evolutionarily, they are different, right? And so each of the sexes is going to push to their advantage so they do a little bit better than the other, and that results in conflict over everything, you know conflict over, you know, what’s a good mate and what’s not a good mate, and you know, from the point of view of a male, he might want to convince the female that he’s a good one, and the female might want to be, you know, hard-pressed to be convinced.

And when you do have the babies, you know, one sex might want to spend less time taking care of the babies, and the other one might say, no, wait a minute, you know, how’s this going to work out? There is always areas of disagreement, essentially, over pretty much every decision that has to do with reproduction when males and females are involved.

And so that’s what we talk about when we talk about conflict. It’s essentially that even though there is a commonality of interest in successfully raising offspring, the details of those agreements are subject to a lot of debate and a lot of back and forth, and that results in this conflict between the sexes while they figure out how we’re going to resolve this.

+ Answer 2

The big underlying, fundamental difference, I guess, between males and females is in what we call gametic anisogamy, right, which is this idea that, that males and females have reproductive cells that are dramatically different, and they require different investment, energetic investment, than physiological investment.

And so that idea is generally the females, they have fewer gametes that are larger, and they are inmotile, so they are kind of big, juicy eggs that are sitting around. Whereas the males are producing the sperm, which are tiny little cells. They are very abundant, and they are very motile, so they are going out into the world to try and find those juicy eggs to fertilize. So from the get-go, the females, because they’re more limited in how many of those cells they can produce in their lifetime. Then they’re going to be expected to be a little bit more careful, right, in their decision-making, a little bit more choosy. Whereas the males, not so much.

And that’s not to say, of course, that the males don’t care, they care too, but comparatively speaking with the female, they, they try to get away with a little bit more because they’re wanting to maximize their possibilities to produce offspring. Whereas the females are more like, ahhhh, you know, I don’t know if you’re the right guy, I don’t know if this is the right circumstance, I don’t know if the conditions are ideal. So from that point on, you know, the males are always going to be a little bit more eager, and the females a little bit less so. And again, this is a generalization, so there’s a lot of detail, and in different species you find different things.

+ Answer 3

That’s a great question, and again, this has to do with the evolution of sex itself, which is probably one of the biggest evolutionary interesting areas of research, right, is why do we have sex in the first place? Why is it then we do have, um, non-facultative sex? So obligate sex, which is really not the rule in nature, right? So we have this idea that hat in biology, because we are humans and we have this more dichotomous view of sexes, that this is really kind of the rule, and this rule is not like that.

And so most species on the planet don’t have sex at all, right? And they don’t have this male and female business, there’s none of this weirdness. They don’t in fact have gametes that are different sizes, they produce cells that are reproductive cells that are of the same size. And so, so there is a lot of other complexity added to this, so then once you get in stuck in this route of, this idea that you’re going to have two gametes that are two different sizes, there have been many different models and attempts to try to explain this from a mathematical point of view, right? Because it’s hard to, sort of see the evolution of it, but we can try to understand it by trying to model it.

And you know, it seems like this is just an evolutionary stable strategy, right? So once you start, kind of changing the conditions, then you’re going to arrive at other mating systems like some of those that are in plants, for example you have plants that are multiple sexes, you know, you’re crossing different sexes, and so I think that in general, our understanding, I think, I guess what I want to say is that we’re still fairly limited in our ability to fully understand the constraints of this system, but what seems to be really true is that this is an evolutionary stable strategy that is kind of hard to move away from once you’re in it.